News What happened with S. 190 and why was it not passed?

[Gokul43201]

This part really impressed me with Biden. Both times he brought it up, he was careful to include the specific reason McCain voted against it. Biden engaged in a thinking person's debate and honesty isn't a liability - at least if you're good.

If you thought that was impressive, you must have missed the first Presidential debate, where the same issue came up when McCain accused Obama of cutting funding for the troops, and Obama responded by pointing out why both he and McCain had voted to cut funding - and that the reasons had nothing to do with "supporting the troops". He could have easily listed all the times that McCain voted against troop funding but didn't. McCain-Palin took the dirty, low road by accusing their opponents of being unpatriotic, and trying to win cheap points in the process. Obama-Biden took the high road on that one, by trying to explain the reasons rather than engaging in insulting rhetoric.

Biden summed up the philosophy in his closing statement. It went something like this: I will never question the motives of the other person; I believe he wants to do as much good as I do. I will, however, question his or her approach.

 

[Evo]

I prefer "Caribou Barbie"...

 

[LowlyPion]

... an objective fact check on a McCain statements about the GSEs?

Poor McCain (and Palin too) have a troop of "What they meant to say" handlers trailing around behind him sweeping up their debris of misstatements and flipped positions.

Mr. Deregulation, Mr. Keating Five, Mr. Fundamentals Are Fine, ... poor McCain. Poor sad McCain. What area does he have any credibility on, other than by chance? If he was so warning everyone about GSEs a couple of years ago, where has he been since until the GSE's were brought back into the Treasury?

He's shot himself in the foot so many times at this point that I imagine he must have installed pop-in prosthetic sockets for easy field replacement.

The Straight Talk Express has gotten so twisted that its front bumper is chasing its exhaust.

 

[Gokul43201]

Any news on how this has shifted the overall national poll numbers?

Hard to say, since there is no statistically significant swing, but from what I've seen, no one can make the case that Obama-Biden have lost ground.

The only major national poll taken after the debate seems to be the http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/general_election_match_up_history . They have Obama leading by 6 points, which is not significantly different from the numbers over the past week (ranging from 5% to 7%).

My guess is that the debate has gained McCain-Palin some nervous rank and file Republicans who were worried about Palin after watching the interviews, and now feel a lot better, but has lost them some vote among undecided independents.

In the electoral maps, Obama-Biden seem only to have gained, if anything. Below are some numbers for the electoral difference, (Obama - McCain), displaying Obama's electoral point lead over McCain, from different polling compilations/aggregates. I've only included compilations that update numbers at a daily rate (CNN, for instance, updates only weekly).

ELECTORAL DIFFERENCE: OBAMA - MCCAIN                 
                                                                 
Date      RCP1      RCP2*  Elec-Vote*  USAtlas  Pollster 

09/26      65        34        34        79        55  
10/01      86       158        96        79        76 

( u p ) b e f o r e  /   ( d o w n ) a f t e r 

10/04      101      168       153        92        87

*NOTE: RCP2 and Elec-Vote do not consider any states "too close to call" unless the polling difference is smaller than 1% for any given state. All the other polls do, and their margin is typically about 3% to 5% for deciding that a particular state is still too close to call either way.

Sources:
1. Previous numbers, from another thread
2. RCP1 and RCP2
3. Elec-Vote
4. US Atlas
5. Pollster

 

[Astronuc]

If that is not a warning there is no such thing. Did he claim to see the entire financial crisis rolling out the way it has? No, and he stated that in the interview with the New Hampshire paper [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTmIJ5Aag2Q"], which pfact can't bother to check. Pfact also ignores very similar warnings about the GSEs from both Greenspan and Bernanke in years past, and in fact the author contradicts both fed chairs with its own reinvention of the the cause.

That was a press release from someone who doesn't do emails or understands computers - his staff does that - according to him.

Here's an interesting comment (the accuracy of which I have not been able to verify. There's a typo in the first paragraph):

S. 190; McCain "Supported" it After it was Dead
[This was supplemented on September 30]

People vehemently say that McCain was a champion of regulation despite his voting record and point to S. 109, a bill introduced in 2005. The bill was introduced by Charles Hagel on the Senate floor and several months later, after it had gone to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing Urban Affairs, McCain announced a in brief speech in the Senate that he was a co-sponsor of the bill.

People argue that it was over the valiant efforts of Republicans, particularly McCain, that the bill was defeated by the Democrats. The first thing that struck me as odd about this is that McCain stood up for the bill only after it had been in committee for several months and no action had been taken. He then said absolutely nothing about the bill.

Could the Democrats have blocked the bill in committee? This seems like an odd thing to say of the minority party. The Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs was chaired by a Republican and Republicans held a clear majority of the seats on the committee.

I found the committee's rules of procedure for the year 2005 and the Republican chairman alone, without any vote could have launched an investigation into the financial trouble of the day that the bill was supposed to address. There was no investigation.

According to the rules the Democrats were powerless to block anything coming out of the committee to be voted on by the Senate but there was no such vote. All it took for the bill to get out of committee was a majority, which was held by Republicans. The bill was amended somehow and reported out of the committee but was never voted on.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/northwestlaw/archives/149530.asp

I'm trying to get to bottom of this. What happened with this legislation? I'm disappointed that I can't simply find a page somewhere that tracks a single piece of legislation through the process. It makes me wonder if Washington operates under 'plausible deniability' or 'rules of obfuscation'.

It may be that S. 1100 (110 th, 2007) got folded into the bailout bill. (?)

I'm going to start a separate thread on the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act.


I wonder if Congress or the Administration will investing Congress's role in this, i.e. why was this legislation not pushed? What obstructed the process? Campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?